2011

Have a good one everybody! Most years I don't make resolutions for fear of breaking them therebye increasing the feelings of inadequacy I'm prone to. This year I have made a couple but am keeping quiet about them - at least that way I'll be the only one who knows if I fail.

I've probably started my grandson on a life of alcoholism by topping up his glass of mulled wine as fast as my own Friday night as we watched episodes of the 4th series of 'Bones' put in my stocking by Santa via my daughter. Sanders is as fond of a good gloopy, slushy autopsy as I am luckily and is quite able to see the humour in the characters - Brennan's rain-man rationality and Angel (David Boreanaz's REAL character) messing around as an FBI agent! They may not be much like the books but they're very entertainingly silly. I love them.

We did finally move on to something slightly more age-appropriate, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which S claims is the only one he really likes because it's not dark. In the run-up to my Christmas each year I always re-read the HP's, a habit which has crept up on me until it has become a tradition.

So we watched the fireworks set off by neighbours as the year changed, accompanied Harry to his triumphal denouement, and fell into bed at 1.45. I ws amazed to be able to get bacon, egg and fried potato into S by 9 am the next morning before he went off to spend a day sea fishing with his father.

Thus the traditions have been observed and the snow has gone (except for the depressing grey hillocks of slush where the ploughs created small mountains of the stuff). My back yard looks like a peanut-packaging plant strewn with the discarded husks and the birds aren't lining up along the fence each morning. I think they go first to the nearbye field of cows to share the delicious silage.

Just to prove to myself I can read something other than crime I took in Sebastian Faulks 'A Week in December' and was very impressed by it - had to stay awake most of the night to get to the end which didn't help my mood the next day. By contrast I borrowed Franzen's 'Freedom' ('A Masterpiece' says the New York Times) and am hating it. I've tried to work out why it's annoying me so much. Is it the American culture, that alien land of baseball, sports jocks, Bush (his ghost lingers) and Macdonalds? Is it (and this seems more likely) the monotonous tempo of the writing? Too many short, breathless sentences like landscape rushing past a train window without the soporific heart-beat of the track noises. Now I'm sounding like Pseuds Corner. Succinctly, I don't like his style. The characters should be sympathetic enough but I don't find them likeable even whilst I understand them. I could just toss it but my ex liked it so I have to keep going to give a good account of my reactions when I return his copy (it's an ego thing!). The first 120 pages weren't so bad. Maybe after the end of the Chateauneuf du Pape left from yesterday's lunch it will read a bit more like War and Peace or Madame Bovary or The Four Gated City or one of the other real literary masterpieces it's being ranked with.